The Conquered Banner
"The Conquered Banner" was the most popular of the post-Civil War Confederate poems.Catholicism and American Freedom,, John McGreevy Norton and Co., New York 2003, p. 112. It was written by Roman Catholic priest and Confederate Army chaplain, Father Abram Joseph Ryan, who is sometimes called the "poet laureate of the postwar south" and "poet-priest of the Confederacy."The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 by David T. Gleeson, reviewed by James M. Woods, The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 415-416. About Ryan told an interviewer that he wrote the poem shortly after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox: :"I wrote 'The Conquered Banner' at Nashville, Tennessee one evening soon after Lee’s surrender, when my mind was engrossed with the thought of our dead soldiers and our dead Cause. It was first published in the New York Freeman’s Journal. I never had any idea that the poem, written in less than an hour, would attain celebrity status. No doubt the circumstances of its appearance lent it much of its fame. In expressing my own emotions at the time, I echoed the unuttered feelings of the Southern people; and so 'The Conquered Banner' became the requiem of the Lost Cause." David O'Connell has described "The Conquered Banner" as echoing Emerson's extremely popular Concord Hymn. According to O'Connell readers would have unconsciously have thought of Emerson's poem Concord when Ryan used the word "conquered", and by echoing Emerson's reference to a furled flag, Ryan would have enhanced the patriotic resonance his poem had among Southern readers brought up reciting Emerson's Concord Hymn. The final verse is taken to be Ryan's statement that however noble he and others thought the Confederate cause had been, the defeat was final, and the Confederate idea should be put away forever, along with the Confederate flag.The Victorian homefront: American thought and culture, 1860-1880," Louise L. Stevenson, Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 147. History The poem was first published on June 24, 1865, in the pro-Confederate Roman Catholic newspaper the ''New York Freeman under the pen-name "Moina".The southern poems of the war, Emily Virginia Mason, John Murphy & Co., Baltimore, 1889, p. 426. Because the same pen-name had been used by southern balladeer Anna Dinnies, anthologist William Gilmore Simms mistakenly attributed "The Conquered Banner" to her, prompting the Freeman's Journal to reprint the poem over Fr. Ryan's name a year later. The poem made Father Ryan famous''Furl that banner: the life of Abram J. Ryan, poet-priest of the South,'' David O'Connell, Mercer University Press, 2006, p. 60-62. and became one of the best known post-war South, memorized and recited by generations of Southern schoolchildren.For, Though Conquered, They Adore It, by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, reviewed in The Review of Politics, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Winter, 2006), pp. 147-150. Attorney and Southerner Hannis Taylor wrote of the impact of Father Ryan's poem on readers sympathetic to the Confederacy, "Only those who lived in the South in that day, and passed under the spell of that mighty song, can properly estimate its power as it fell upon the victims of a fallen cause."Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, University of Georgia Press, 2009, pp. 60-61. The poem reached the height of its popularity between 1890 and 1920. In 1941 Carl Van Doren included the poem in The Patriotic Anthology, writing that to omit Southern "expressions of patriotism" would be to "falsify the record and also impoverish it.""New Editions," Edward Larocque Tinker, Aug. 31, 1941, New York Times. References External links * Complete text at CivilWarPoetry.org Category:Songs of the American Civil War Category:1865 poems Category:Text of poem